KIRKUS REVIEW

A train carrying an ill-assorted collection of passengers runs
into a snowbank in a fantasy-world 1930s, and—but wait, this isn’t Murder
on the Orient Express, though
it was originally published only three years later.

When a Christmas Eve blizzard brings their journey from Euston
Station to an untimely halt, the passengers—David Carrington and his sister,
Lydia; clerk Robert Thomson; chorine Jessie Noyes; Edward Maltby, of the Royal
Psychical Society; and an old bore named Hopkins —severally leave their
carriage seeking the Hemmersby train station. Hopelessly lost, they’re reunited
when they all take refuge in Valley House, a dwelling where the kettle is
boiling and the table hospitably set for tea even though the place is deserted.
It’s enough to rattle anyone, even before they discover a knife on the kitchen
floor. Hopkins, whose unannounced discovery of a corpse in the neighboring
train compartment gave him a particularly compelling reason to strike out in
the snow, is especially rattled, and his temper doesn’t improve when he learns
of a Cockney arrival at Valley House called Smith, who insists he was never on
the train even though he drops a ticket to Manchester at Maltby’s feet. It’s
Maltby who takes the lead in shepherding his bewildered fellow travelers
through an intricate, ingenious, and increasingly improbable series of
inferences that end by uncovering a fiendish domestic conspiracy that’s left
four homicides in its wake. Both the tale and its cast will have jumped the
shark repeatedly and pleasurably, at least for fans of agreeably decorous
thrills, by the time Christmas finally dawns.

Farjeon (1883-1955) provides a superior example of the Old Dark
House genre, this time with snow, that will remind readers with long memories
of his play No. 17, impudently
filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1932.

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